From the Nightside
by Angeliz
Summary: The world is changed where touched by truth. A book-prompt challenge, consisting of ten not-necessarily-connected ficlets. Many characters, many scenarios, many style variations. I've been wanting to try this for awhile.


Author note: Heya, peeps. How goes it? I've been battling with writer's block for awhile, yet again, so I decided to try a challenge I've always kind of wanted to fiddle with. Basically, you pick a random book, and then you find the first line of every ten pages until you collect ten of them. These lines serve as prompts for short little fic scenarios. The book I chose was _Something from the Nightside_ by Simon R. Green. The resulting fic-bits aren't really supposed to connect to each other, and they're all over the place style-wise-the link between them all is simply the book that prompted them. Anyway, hope you enjoy. If you leave comments, I'll love you forever (even if they're cruel). Lols. :3

…

_10. It hadn't been a good year—not for a long time._

Not for over fifteen years, really, not since…

No. It still hurt to think of it.

Fifteen years, yet he still woke every morning to an empty bed, an empty soul, and it hurt more than words could describe, for he always half-expected, half-hoped…

Would this be the morning of breaking, the dawn and the dream?

It couldn't be real, for if it were real he was a murderer, _he had killed his best friend_. If it were real, he couldn't breathe, couldn't live, couldn't wait through each day for the numbness of a drug-induced sleep…

The mirrors all were broken, crunching beneath his feet.

…

_20. Despite all my better judgment._

Mai glanced out at the rows of friends and family, impeccably dressed and all eyes on her. She glanced at the diamond sparkle of her ring, throwing tiny prisms across her fingers in the sunlight. She glanced at Jou, the idiot, fidgeting and nervous and so painfully out of place in his formal attire that it almost hurt to look at him. Her lips quirked upward in a self-assured smile.

"I do," she said finally, and the answering grin she received was so saturated with relief that she almost felt sorry for making him squirm.

…

_30. Still, we all do what we have to, I suppose._

Seto was shaking.

He was alive and whole, and Mokuba needed him, and it was all that held him together through the long, starless nights. Work was better, work was busy, work was reorganizing and rebuilding and restructuring a company to his own specifications. But the nights…

But soon there were no more nights, only shaking in an empty building as Mokuba slept beneath his trenchcoat.

…

_40. They were loud and obnoxious and loving every minute of it._

New Years tolled in with rumpled kimonos, drunken karaoke, and peals of laughter so true and so deep that their sides hurt with the gasping effort of it all. It was unconventional, untraditional, but it was theirs and they knew it, surrounded by spun-out tops and scattered playing cards, the drone of the television in the background. They held to each other with a desperation buried far beneath the festivity, with a fear of growing old and apart, a fear of someday forgetting, unspoken and insistent beneath the smoke-pop of the noisemakers.

In three hundred and sixty-five days Anzu would be in New York, and nothing would really be the same.

…

_50. Or somewhere to hide a body for a while._

"You cannot possibly be serious."

Bakura only looked at him, bloodied and wild and irrefutably insane, the corpse dribbling blood over sneakers and doormat alike. With an infuriated hiss, Ryou dragged them both through the door, hoping to hell that the Domino City Police would have no business in his apartment complex tonight.

With his luck, though…

Ryou shook the thought away, stepping gingerly over the cadaver in the doorway. Youngish, male, covered in various lacerations and leaking his insides all over the carpet, a forensics field day for all the trace evidence trapped in his scraggly hair alone. The smell might hold awhile, with the weather, as long as he took care to keep the thermostat low, but there were bound to be blood trails all down the stairwell. Bakura stood silently nearby, wringing slush from his hair with an unworried frown.

"Hope you don't mind. I'll have it disposed of as soon as I can, but with Christmas…"

"Yes, all those young lovers out; wouldn't want a witness."

Bakura blinked. "You sound pissed."

"Of course I'm pissed," Ryou shot back, nose wrinkling at the slow spread of blood over carpet. "You haven't been by in months, and the first I finally see you is to help you hide the body of some idiot kid who probably tripped over you in a bar! And you drag it up ten flights of stairs like some amateur, leave a trail straight to my apartment so when the police arrive in the morning I'll be all set to wish them a happy fucking holiday season!"

"Rapist, actually," said Bakura, "so I guess I might have saved some chick. But I did _not_ leave a trail, for hell's sake; give me _some _credit, yadonushi." His sneakers hit the floor with a dull thud, corpse trailing noiselessly behind his borrowed house slippers. "Do you want this anywhere special?"

"Do I…what…you saved someone?"

Bakura rolled his eyes, positively jolly in the act of stuffing his tagalong cadaver into the nearest closet. "Tis the season. Looks like the criminal mastermind made it to the guest room before me, though. Mind if I sleep in your bed?"

Behind the snow-spiked bangs and the fevered eyes there was real question, a spark of uncertainty that told Ryou there were reasons his other had risked ten flights of stairs and criminal charges in order to hide out in his apartment. And on _Christmas_, no less. Despite the dead man occupying his guest room, Ryou could not stop his slow smile, nor the warm familiar feeling of Bakura come home.

"Not at all," he said softly, with a slight shake of his head. "Though I must insist that you shower first."

…

_60. The better to show off their impressive muscles._

"Gah!"

"Yugi?"

"Nothing, it's nothing! I wasn't…thinking."

"…Are you certain that you're all right?"

"Fine! Peachy. Just distracted. Thinking."

"Ah. Anything in particular?"

"Oh, memories, you know. Battle City, the finals, lavender tank-tops…_rippling, sun-kissed abdominals_."

"What was that last one?"

"…Duel Monsters?"

"I…think it might be time for me to leave."

"And I think that you're a wise, wise pharaoh."

…

_70. Joanna looked at me accusingly._

Her eyes were a bright, burning green, narrowed with such ferocity that Anzu completely missed the feral phrases being bitten out between them. There was a magic to those gold-flecked irises that simply demanded her attention, a jewel-bright blaze that awakened with her anger, sharp and somehow beautiful across the piano keys. It was like another world behind those eyes, the shade-bright of summer dusted with emerald fire, swallowing her whole in a sudden rush of heat.

She had come to New York to dance, but this…this was the reason she stayed.

A startled sound escaped her lips before Anzu managed to close the space between them, and then words were forgotten as a different sort of battle was forged, not of language but of movement, with their ever-surging rhythm steady and unpredictable between them.

The photograph fluttered forgotten to the floor.

…

_80. And the awful ruddy lighting took back its hold on the alley._

"…Why is the sky red?"

"Why are you talking to me?"

"There's no one else around. …Is there?"

"Shouldn't that, in itself, tell you something important?"

"What…wait. Where's Yugi? Is Ryou with you?"

"Nope."

"How are you not concerned about this? What did you do with them? And, and what did you do to the sky?"

"This has nothing to do with me, pharaoh. Your unconscious mind is none of my concern, as long as you keep it all in your pants."

"What? How dare you even imply—"

"Then I suppose _that_ is morning wood?"

Yami jumped and cracked his skull on the headboard, already reaching into his pajama pants with a sleepy sense of exasperation. The third time this week, and gods, he needed therapy.

…

_90. Its long stock etched with offensive charms and sigils._

Yami could feel the power there, pulsing and ancient, like time and dried blood and sand-speckled wind. His fingers flinched from the doorframe of their own accord, and he let them slide away, falling limply to his side. He already knew, anyway.

"Bakura," he called, soft and uncertain with a language long dead. "Open the door. I wish to speak with you." Silence hovered, trailing behind his words, saturated with the deep gold of their power, the dark burn of their pain. Bakura did not open the door.

"Open," Yami commanded, this time of the door itself. Wood creaked, hieroglyphs hissed and threw sparks, and a dozen tiny holes burrowed hotly through his jacket sleeve. After a moment, though, the resistance dissolved, unable to defy the authority of his birthright, and he was able to toe the door open gingerly. "Bakura?"

"Leave," came the voice, in the harsh, forgotten language that tied them still together. Its authority was lacking, though, unfettered by blood, held only by a will that was slowly fracturing and fading away. Yami ignored the halfhearted order, his path through the apartment guided by wisps of memory that were less than his own, less than the world.

He found Bakura in the bedroom, still and gray as a corpse. His lips were cracked and wet with blood.

"Ryou wouldn't want this," said Yami, after a moment or an eternity of Bakura slowly breathing. He made no attempt at the incense-burnt language of old, the language of their past and their truth, for they were mere words. He believed them no more than he did anything else of his life.

Bakura's eyes fluttered closed, brittle skin over dull irises, pupils shot and unseeing in the summer heat. "I've been dead for generations, pharaoh. Isn't it time to step aside and let nature take its course?"

The room was still around them, undisturbed. They were simply too exhausted to die.

…

_100. "Maybe we should come back another time," said Joanna._

"Don't be silly," Anzu said, mouth set into a stern line. "They knew we were coming."

"But they sound…so…occupied."

"This is nothing," Anzu assured her, hand raised to knock once more. "They never stop; you just have to find an in." With an exasperated snort, she let her hand fall away from the shabby door, gliding upward through her hair and retreating with a wiry pin. "Don't look."

"Augh!" cried Yugi, scrambling for the sheet as the door banged against the wall. "What are you doing here? We've still got an hour!"

"No," Anzu said firmly, one hand on her hip, casting an impressive silhouette against the motel balcony. "In fact, you are one hour _late_. We've come to fetch you; it's been absolute ages and you can screw anytime."

"I don't get it," Yugi said, his small hands scrabbling for the alarm clock. "I thought we had time; the clock was fine last night—"

He cut off at a sense of the smug smile emanating from the rumpled bedsheets beside him, tossing a glare over his shoulder with little success in execution. "You set the clock back. You _jackass_."

"I've led a troubled life," said Ryou, his smirk practically sparkling against his pale skin. "But where are your manners? We're very pleased to meet you, Joanna."

"Please," she squeaked, still half-obscured by Anzu's overwhelming presence in the doorway. "The pleasure's all mine."


End file.
